The Doll

by Bolesław Prus

  He noticed a small street opposite, and a huge square beyond, in which a slender column stood. He walked in that direction. As he approached, the column grew taller and the square expanded. Large fountains were playing both in front of and behind the column; yellowing clumps of trees, like gardens, stretched to right and left; in the background was a river, above which the smoke of a swiftly passing steamboat streamed along. Relatively few carriages were moving around the square, but there were many children with their mothers and nursemaids. Soldiers of various regiments were walking about, and a band was playing somewhere.

  Wokulski approached the obelisque and was amazed. He found himself in the centre of an area two miles long and half a mile wide. Behind was a garden, in front a very long drive. On both sides were squares and palaces, and a huge arch stood far off on a hill. Wokulski felt that epithets and superlatives failed him.

  ‘This is the Place de la Concorde; that’s an obelisk from Luxor (genuine, sir!); behind us are the Tuileries, in front the Champs-Elysées and there, at the end, the Arc de Triomphe…’ Wokulski glanced around: beside him was hovering a gentleman in dark spectacles and rather shabby gloves. ‘We might go that way—a divine stroll! Look at the traffic!’ said the stranger. All at once he broke off, walked rapidly away and disappeared between two passing carriages.

  Meanwhile a uniformed man in a short cape approached. He gazed at Wokulski a moment and said, with a smile: ‘You are a foreigner? Pray beware of casual acquaintances in Paris…’

  Wokulski instinctively touched the side pocket of his top-coat and realised his silver cigarette-case was gone. He flushed, politely thanked the officer in the cape, but did not admit his loss. Jumart’s definition crossed his mind, and he told himself that he knew the source of income of the man in shabby gloves, though he knew nothing of his outgoings: ‘Jumart is right,’ he thought, ‘criminals are less suspect than people who acquire their money Heaven knows where,’ and he recalled many such in Warsaw. ‘Perhaps that’s why there are no buildings, no Arcs de Triomphe there…’

  He walked along the Champs-Elysées and was stunned by the unending stream of carriages and carts, amidst which rode men and women on horseback. As he walked, he tried to dispel the dismal thoughts which encircled him like a flock of bats. He walked on and was afraid to look back: in this street, effervescent with splendour and gaiety, he seemed like a crushed worm dragging its entrails behind it.

  He reached the Arc de Triomphe, and turned back slowly. When he reached the Place de la Concorde again, he saw—behind the Tuileries—a huge black balloon which rose rapidly into the air, remained there a while, then slowly sank down: ‘The Giffard balloon,’ he thought, ‘a pity I haven’t time today…’

  He turned from the square into some street, where a garden stretched to the right, separated by iron railings and posts on which vases stood, and to the left was a series of apartment houses with semicircular roofs, a forest of chimneys large and small, and neverending balustrades…He walked slowly and thought with alarm that after a visit of barely eight hours, Paris had begun to bore him…

  ‘Bah!’ he muttered. ‘But the Exhibition, the museums, the balloon?…’

  Continuing along the rue de Rivoli, at around seven o’clock he reached the square on which, solitary as a finger, rose a gothic tower surrounded by trees and a low fence of iron bars. More streets again branched off from here.

  Feeling tired, Wokulski beckoned to a horse-drawn cab and within half an hour was back in his hotel, having passed the already familiar Porte St-Denis on the way.

  The meeting with ship-builders and engineers lasted until midnight, accompanied by many bottles of champagne. Wokulski, who had to substitute for Suzin in the talks and to take copious notes, did not feel at ease until he had this work. Refreshed, he hurried to his room and, instead of tormenting himself with the mirror, took a plan of Paris to bed with him. ‘Nothing to it,’ he thought, ‘some hundred square miles in area, two million inhabitants, thousands of streets, ten thousand public conveyances…’ Then he read a long list of the most celebrated buildings in Paris and thought with shame that he would never find his way around this city. ‘The Exhibition…Notre-Dame…Les Halles…the Bastille…the Madeleine…the sewers…goodness!’ he said.

  He turned out the light. The street was quiet; a grey glow of light, probably reflected from the clouds, entered at the window. But there was a roaring and a ringing in Wokulski’s ears, and before his eyes stretched streets as smooth as floors, trees surrounded by iron fences, buildings of hewn stone, throngs of people and carriages coming and going Heaven knows where. He fell asleep watching this crowd of sights, and thought, that come what may, he would remember his first day in Paris for the rest of his life.

  Then he dreamed that the ocean of houses and forests of statues and endless lines of trees were falling in upon him, and that he himself was asleep in a profound tomb, alone, tranquil, almost happy. He was asleep, thinking of nothing, forgetful of everyone, and would sleep thus for ever were it not, alas, for a drop of grief that lay within or alongside him, so minute that the human eye could not perceive it, yet so bitter that it could poison the whole world.

  From the day when he first plunged into Paris, a life that was almost mystical started for Wokulski. Apart from a few hours devoted to advising Suzin with the ship-builders, Wokulski was entirely free, and he spent the time in perfectly disorganised visits to the city. He would choose a neighbourhood from the index in his Guide, and would go there in an open carriage without even looking at the street-plan. He climbed steps, walked around buildings, hurried through halls, stopped at interesting sights, and drove on again according to the alphabetical index, in the same carriage, which he hired for the day. But, since what he most feared was the lack of something to do, he spent his evenings looking at the city plan, crossing out the places he had visited and making notes.

  Sometimes Jumart accompanied him on these excursions and took him to places the guidebooks did not mention: to merchant stores, to factory workshops, to the homes of craftsmen, to student quarters, to the cafés and restaurants along the streets of the fourth quarter. It was here at last that Wokulski became acquainted with the real life of Paris.

  In the course of these trips he climbed towers: St-Jacques, Notre-Dame and the Panthéon; he went up the Trocadéro in a lift, descended into the Parisian sewers and to the catacombs decorated with human skulls; he visited the world exhibition, the Louvre, and Cluny, the Bois de Boulogne, and cemeteries, the cafés de la Rotonde, du Grand Balcon, and fountains, schools and hospitals, the Sorbonne and the fencing halls, the Conservatory and musical halls, animal fights and theatres, the Stock Exchange, the July Column and temple interiors. All these sights created chaos around him, corresponding to the chaos reigning in his own soul.

  Sometimes, running over the objects seen in his mind—from the Palace of Exhibitions, two kilometres in circumference, to the pearl in the Bourbon crown, no bigger than a pea—he asked: what is it that I want? And it emerged that he wanted nothing. Nothing gripped his attention, nothing quickened the beating of his heart, or prompted him to action. If, for the price of a walking trip from the cemetery of Montmartre to that of Montparnasse, he was offered the whole of Paris with the condition that it should absorb and stimulate him, he would not have gone those five kilometres. But he walked tens of them daily, only in order to deaden his memories.

  Sometimes it seemed to him he was a being which had been born by a strange chapter of accidents, a few days ago, here on the pavements of Paris, and that everything which came into his mind was only an illusion, a dream from some earlier existence which had never really existed. Then he told himself that he was perfectly happy; he rode from one end of Paris to the other and scattered handfuls of louis d’or like a madman. ‘It’s all the same to me,’ he muttered. If only it weren’t for that particle of grief, so minute yet so bitter!

  Sometimes, against the background of grey days, when it seemed to him that the whole world of
palaces, fountains, sculptures, pictures and machinery was collapsing about him, an incident occurred to remind him he was not an illusion, but a real man, sick of a cancer in his soul. He was once in the Théâtre de Varietés, in the rue Montmartre, a few hundred yards from his hotel. Three farces were to be performed, with an operetta as entr’acte. He went there to stun himself with buffoonery, but almost as soon as the curtain rose, he heard a phrase from the stage, uttered in a tearful voice: ‘A lover can forgive his mistress anything, except another lover…’

  ‘Sometimes a man has to forgive three or four!’ cried a Frenchman sitting next to him, laughing.

  Wokulski felt stifled; the earth seemed to be giving way, the ceiling coming down upon him. He could not stay in the theatre. He rose from his seat which, unfortunately, was in the centre of a row, and drenched in a cold sweat, treading on his neighbours’ toes, he fled from the performance.

  He hastened in the direction of the hotel, then went into the first pavement café. He did not recall what he was asked, nor what he replied. All he knew was that he was served with coffee and a carafe of brandy marked with little lines which indicated the contents of a glass. Wokulski drank and thought: ‘Starski is the second lover, Ochocki the third…And Rossi? Rossi, for whom I arranged the claque, and to whom I took that present at the theatre. What was he? You fool—she’s Messalina, if not physically, then morally…And I? I am supposed to be insane about her…I!’

  He felt his own rage steadying him: when it was time for the bill, he realised the carafe was empty. ‘All the same, brandy helps…’ he thought. From then on, whenever he was reminded of Warsaw or met a woman with something special in her gestures, dress or looks, he would go into a café and drink a carafe of brandy. Only then did he venture to recall Izabela, and would feel surprised that a man like him should love a woman like that. ‘Yet surely I deserve to be the first and the last,’ he thought. The brandy carafe emptied, he leaned his head in his hand and dozed, to the great amusement of the waiters and customers.

  Then he would again visit the Exhibition, the museums, the artesian wells, schools and theatres, for days at a time, not to learn anything, but to deaden his memories.

  Slowly, against the background of dull and ill-defined sufferings, a question began to take hold of him: was there some kind of order in the construction of Paris? Was there one object with which it could be compared, a system according to which it could be regulated?

  Seen from the Panthéon and from the Trocadéro, Paris appeared the same: a sea of houses, criss-crossed by a thousand streets, the irregular roofs looked like waves, the chimneys like spray, and the towers and columns like larger waves.

  ‘Chaos!’ said Wokulski. ‘But how could it be otherwise in a place where a million endeavours converge. A great city is a cloud of dust; it has contingent contours, but can have no logic. If it did, the fact would have been discovered long ago by the authors of guides; for is that not their role?…’

  And he examined a plan of the city, mocking his own efforts. ‘Only one man, and a genius at that, can create a style, a plan,’ he thought. ‘But that a million people, working across several centuries and ignorant of each other, should create some kind of a logical whole, it is simply impossible.’

  Slowly, however, to his great surprise, he perceived that this Paris, built over several centuries, by a million people, ignorant of each other and with no plan in mind, did, nevertheless, have a plan, it constituted a whole, even a very logical one.

  He was first struck by the fact that Paris was like a great bowl, nine kilometres wide from north to south and eleven kilometres long from east to west. To the south, this bowl was cracked and divided by the Seine, which cut it in a bow running from the north-east corner through the centre of the city and turning to the south-west corner. An eight-year-old child could have outlined such a plan.

  ‘All right,’ thought Wokulski, ‘but where is the order in the positioning of individual buildings…Notre-Dame in one direction, the Trocadéro in another, and the Louvre, the Exchange, the Sorbonne!…Nothing but chaos…’

  But when he began to examine the plan of Paris more closely, he noticed something that not only native Parisians had failed to perceive (which was less strange), but even K. Baedeker, who claimed the right to know his way about the whole of Europe.

  Despite an apparent chaos, Paris did have a plan, a logic, even though it had been built over several centuries by millions of people ignorant of each other and giving no thought at all to logic or style.

  Paris possessed what could be called a backbone, the city’s crystal axis.

  The Vincennes forest lay in the south-east, and the edge of the Bois de Boulogne on the north-west side of Paris. So—this crystal axis of the city was like a great caterpillar (almost six kilometres in length) which, bored with the Bois de Vincennes, had gone for a walk to the Bois de Boulogne.

  Its tail leaned against the Place de la Bastille, its head on the Etoile, its body cleaved almost to the Seine. The Champs-Elysées were the neck, the Tuileries and Louvre its corset, and its tail was the Hôtel de Ville, Notre-Dame and, finally, the July Column on the Place de la Bastille.

  This caterpillar possessed many long and short legs. From the head, the first pair leaned to the left: the Champ de Mars, the Trocadéro Palace and Exhibition; to the right they reached as far as the Montmartre cemetery. The second pair (of shorter legs) reached the Military School on the left, the Hotel des Invalides, and the Chamber of Deputies; to the right the Madeleine church and the Opéra. Then (ever on towards the tail), to the left the School of Fine Arts, to the right the Palais Royal, the bank and Stock Exchange; to the left the Institut de France and mint, to the right Les Halles; to the left the Palais du Luxembourg, the Cluny museum and Medical School, to the right the Place de la République, with the Prince Eugène barracks.

  Aside from the crystal axis and the regularities in the general contours of the city, Wokulski also became convinced (something the guides pointed out anyway) that in Paris there existed whole divisions of human labour and some order in their arrangement. Between the Place de la Bastille and the Place de la République were grouped mainly trade and craftsmen; opposite them, on the other bank of the Seine, was the ‘Latin Quarter’, a nest of students and scholars. Between the Opéra, the Place de la République and the Seine was export trade and finance; between Notre-Dame, the Institut de France and the Montparnasse cemetery clustered the remains of the country’s aristocracy. From the Opéra to the Etoile stretched the neighbourhood of the wealthy parvenus, and opposite them, on the left bank of the Seine, opposite the Hotel des Invalides and the Military School, was the seat of military affairs and World Exhibitions.

  These observations woke new currents in Wokulski’s soul, of which he had not thought before, or only imprecisely. And so the great city, like a plant or beast, had its own anatomy and physiology. And so the work of millions of people who proclaimed their free will so loudly produced the same results as bees building regular honeycombs, ants raising rounded mounds, or chemical compounds forming regular crystals.

  Thus there was nothing accidental in society, but an inflexible law which, as if in irony at human pride, manifested itself so clearly in the life of the most capricious of nations, the French! It had been ruled by Merovingians and Carolingians, Bourbons and Bonapartes; there had been three republics and a couple of anarchies, the Inquisition and atheism; rulers and ministers followed one upon the other like the cut of gowns or the clouds in the sky…But despite so many apparently fundamental changes, Paris took on ever more precisely the form of a dish torn by the Seine; the crystal axis was delineated ever more clearly running from the Place de la Bastille to the Etoile; ever more clearly did the districts define themselves: the learned and the industrial, the ancestral and the industrial, the military and the parvenu.

  Wokulski perceived this same fatalism in the history of a dozen of the more prominent Parisian families. The grandfather, as a humble craftsman, worked at the
rue du Temple, sixteen hours a day; his son, plunging into the Latin quarter, set up a larger workshop in the rue St-Antoine. His grandson, even more submerged in the scholarly district, moved as a great tradesman to the Boulevard Poissonnier, and his grandson, as a millionaire, set up house in the neighbourhood of the Champs-Elysées so that…his daughters could suffer from nervous dispositions at the Boulevard St-Germain. Thus a race exhausted with work and enriched near the Bastille, worn out alongside the Tuileries, expired in the vicinity of Notre-Dame. The city’s topography reflected this history of its inhabitants.

  Pondering this strange regularity of facts, recognised as irregular, Wokulski sensed that if anything was to cure his apathy, it would be analysis of this kind.

  ‘I am a strange man,’ he said to himself, ‘and so have gone mad, but civilisation will rescue me.’

  Every day in Paris brought him new ideas or clarified the secrets of his own soul. Once, drinking iced coffee in a café, a street singer drew near the verandah and, to the accompaniment of a harp, sang:

  Au printemps, la feuille repousse,

  Et la fleur embellit les prés,

  Mignonette, en foulant la mousse,

  Suivons les papillons diapres.

  Vois les se poser sur les roses;

  Comme eux aussi, je veux poser,

  Ma lèvre sur tes lèvres closes,

  Et te ravir un doux baiser!

  And at once several customers echoed the last passage: ‘Fools!’ Wokulski thought, ‘they’ve nothing better to do than repeat such rubbish.’ He rose, scowling, and with a pain in his heart, walked through a crowd of people as lively, noisy, chattering and singing as children let out of school: ‘Fools! Fools!’ he repeated.